A Death at Cornell: Parents Belatedly Learn a Serial Killer's Name

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: January 24, 2005

Correction Appended

If Michael Bruce Ross, a convicted serial killer, is executed on schedule Wednesday morning in a northern Connecticut prison, he will die without having been prosecuted for raping and strangling Dzung Ngoc Tu on the campus of Cornell University in May 1981.

It took several days before the body of Ms. Tu, 25, a first-year graduate student in economics, was discovered in the waters of Fall Creek, the first fatality but the final victim in a series of sexual assaults at Cornell that spring.

But it took nearly 24 years, until the week before Mr. Ross's scheduled execution, for her family, Vietnamese immigrants who came to this Washington suburb in the middle of the Vietnam War, to learn that the crime that devastated them so long ago had been solved for much of the two decades they have spent grieving. Mr. Ross confessed to it in 1987, but was never charged.

''My sister went back to college one day and then we heard she was dead and that was it,'' Lan Manh Tu, her older brother, recalled in a phone interview last Wednesday, the same conversation in which he learned from a reporter that her death had been linked to Mr. Ross. ''It was thought likely that somebody, that whoever had murdered my sister, was one of these people who had the wrong wiring. They prey on strangers and are very difficult to catch unless they do something to attract attention.''

If the case of Dzung Ngoc Tu seems a murder mystery cruelly and unnecessarily prolonged, it is also a complex one, full of conflicting memories and lingering questions, of grief enduring beneath emotional reserve, and of a golden lost daughter whose father still kneels before her ashes to mourn.

''He has never been able to mention it,'' Lan Tu said, ''the fact that my sister died.''

In 1984, after Mr. Ross was arrested and linked to six killings in Connecticut in which five of the victims were raped, he became a suspect in two similar rapes and killings in New York State. One was the 1982 death of Paula Perrera, 16, in Wallkill, about 90 miles north of New York City. The other was that of Ms. Tu at Cornell in Ithaca, where Mr. Ross graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics shortly after her death.

Mr. Ross eventually was sentenced to death for four of the Connecticut cases, and also confessed to both New York crimes. In 2001, long after he was originally convicted in Connecticut, he was convicted and sentenced to 8 to 25 years in prison in Orange County in the case of Paula Perrera.

But for reasons of practicality and what an investigator and prosecutor said they perceived as a desire for family privacy, Tompkins County, where Cornell is located, never charged Mr. Ross for killing Dzung Ngoc Tu, who was, by his own account, his first murder victim.

Now, because he has decided not to pursue appeals, Mr. Ross is about to become the first person executed in New England since 1960. His status as a so-called volunteer has prompted a flurry of last-minute court efforts by death penalty opponents to stop the execution, even as state polls and many politicians show support for it.

The final days before the execution have made for a passionate and legally complicated countdown in Connecticut, where some victims' families have attended court hearings for years. But it was not until Friday that a sense of expectation arose in the modest Bethesda house where Ms. Tu arrived in 1969 at the age of 13 and where her parents still live.

On Friday, Lan Tu, after consulting an uncle, approached his father with the news about the killer. The day before, he had told his siblings and other relatives. ''He had no idea,'' Lan Tu said of his father. ''This is the first he had heard of it.''

The next morning, the father sat on a leather sofa in front of a wide window that framed the falling snow. He is 74 years old, and he asked that he and his wife not be fully identified to protect the privacy they have long tried to maintain.

''It feels like a nightmare is coming back,'' he said evenly, his sandaled feet resting flat on the chilly living room floor. ''But I'm glad to know her killer was caught.''

He sat very still but left the room twice over more than an hour, once returning with tea, once returning with the last photograph taken of his oldest daughter, smiling at her 25th birthday party at Cornell a month before she was killed.

A friend had sent it with a letter of condolence, one of dozens the family has saved. Mr. Tu's voice caught briefly at one point as he nodded to an evergreen tree in the backyard.

''I used to sit in that seat and look at that tree outside the window and see her up there,'' he said. ''But I also knew I had to go on with my life. I still had a family.''

In Connecticut, Mr. Ross has become a familiar face on television news and in newspapers, constantly reiterating a wish to be executed that he says is rooted in a desire to help heal his victims' families.

In Bethesda, Mr. Tu and his family said they had never heard of Mr. Ross. Only now, over hours and days, were they absorbing the range of emotions other families have experienced over years. Mr. Tu said he shared the news with his wife early Saturday morning. Mrs. Tu, who is not fluent in English, stayed in a back bedroom while Mr. Tu and his son Lan, 49, talked to a reporter in the living room.

Correction: January 26, 2005, Wednesday
A headline on Monday with an article about the 1981 killing of a Cornell University student by a serial killer now on death row in Connecticut omitted attribution for the claim that the student's family was not informed until recently that the case was solved in 1987. That is the family's contention. Because of an editing error, the article referred imprecisely to the accounts given by the family of the victim, Dzung Ngoc Tu, and by Cornell. The sides differ on when and how the university informed the family about the investigation; their differences go beyond conflicting memories and lingering questions. Cornell officials disclosed records yesterday describing their contacts with the family. Developments are reported today on Page B5.